Search Engine Optimization

There have been people asking if I am able to help them optimize their website for them. And the numbers seems to increasing by the month especially this year. This set me thinking what is so great about search engine optimization?

What is search engine optimization anyway? one might ask.

Well search engine optimization, by my definition, is a way for designing your website such that it can be easily search via the search engines. And when I say search engines, it does not mean the big names like Yahoo or Googles. It can be for smaller, unheard of search engines that are gathered in the world too. So, after optimization, the sites ranking may be high in one search engine but not in another.

Anyway, back to the point of what is so great about search engine optimization? To me, it is a good avenue for making money, no doubt. As each SEO project might cost between 3k to 10k, depending on the coding that the website is written and what are the keywords that the clients might want. But don't jump into this market because I said that it is good money.

To me, SEO is interesting and letting websites have higher ranking does poses its challenge and gives a certain satisfaction. However, to be honest, I rejected quite a few people who wants to do SEO. Not because they don't have the budget, but because they don't know what they want for their site and they demanded traceable results.

Some people will now be screaming, "then show them the results", but other than showing high ranked search results for certain keywords, what can be shown? Higher Alexa ranking? Better Hit counters? Is that it? No no, the client wants a certain ROI. Which honestly speaking, I do not know how to provide. SEO is a better coding of the website, which the web designer should have already done when the client was going through the website with them.

Us, being second hand, can only do so much. and when the results cannot be clearly stated, I rather not earn the money but go into more traceable methods...

Sorry if I do not sound straight thoughts today, cos I am not feeling well and just want to get this off my chest...:)

Firefox Can "See" What IE Cannot

Problem Scenario

A client called me the other day and started to panic as he was not able to see his website on his Mac. I thought, well another mac user... anyway, it was a big deal as the entire website was unable to load! only the background can be seen. I immediately turned on my PC and went to the site... strangely, I could see the site and told him so... and he was not really willing to accept my reasoning. So in between his sentences, i launched firefox to see the website, and to my horror, there really isn't anything there?! I quickly told him that I will look into it, put down the phone and tested the files in the local PC....

Yup, IE can see every word fine... nothing wrong with the site... but nothing can be seen on firefox. So first I tried to save all the files again and check if it is ANSI types... instead of Unicode... since my text.css is ANSI... then i launch, still nothing.. hmmm strange... this went on for another hour...

Solution Scenario

I went to the text.css file and looked through the codings.. then i noticed that under td, it was color: "#ffffff", with the "" .... I felt that it was strange and removed all the "", then everything could be seen, even in firefox... interesting...:)

Anyway, I went to my guru, who told me that IE could oversee any minor mistakes in coding but other browsers would go strictly by the book... so well, which one is the clever browser now?? At least, I think for developers, Firefox should be used...:)

About SingPass Log in with IE

Problem Scenario

Yesterday night, I went to my cousin's place as she wanted me to help her to fix up her PC. She had a problem of not able to use IE 7 to log into the DBS Internet Banking facility. In addition, she was not able to log into her SingPass to do her taxes.

I went to check through the websites of iras.gov.sg and dbs.com.sg for assistance to how to solve it but to no avail, as they only support up to IE 6. I then went to j2ee.com to see if I can download something to make the java scripts work. However, I was quite stunned as there were many softwares available.

I also checked through her add/remove programs and found that she has the latest updates for j2ee... I was at my wits end....

Solution

Download and install Firefox if you do not have it. After installation, open up the firefox browser to the sites you need. You will find that you can use the java environment thingy... dunno what happened, but this is how I solved it...:)